Their names were Octave Feuillet, Alfred Capus, and Maurice Donnay; their names were Hermant, Courteline, and René Bazin; their names were Jules Renard, Marcelle Tinayre, and André Theuriet; and Clarétie, and Frapié and Tristan Bernard; and de Régnier and Paul Reboux, and Lavedan; their names were Rosny, Gyp, Boylesve, and Richepin; their names were Bordeaux, Prévost, Margueritte, and Duvernois — their names, Great God! their names were countless as the sands upon the shore — and in the end, their names were only names and names and names — and nothing more.
Or, if their names were something more than names — if they sometimes shaped themselves in his mind as personalities — these personalities were faded, graceful, and phantasmal ones — each talented and secure in his position and curiously alike — each brave and good and gentle in his trade, like lesser-known knights of the Round Table. He knew that few of them had been the hero of a generation, the leader of a century; he knew that none of them had rivalled Balzac, surpassed Stendhal, outdone Flaubert. And for this reason, their vague, phantasmal company became more haunting-strange to him than if they had.
He knew, as well, that there must be among them great differences of talent, great differences of style. His reason told him that some were good, and some were fair, and some were only cheap; even his meagre understanding of their tongue showed him that there was a great range, every kind of difference in their choice and treatment of a subject — a range that swept from the gracefully ironic sentiment of Les Vacances d’un Jeune Homme Sage to the stern earth-and-peasant austerity of Le Blé qui lève; from the dream nostalgia of Le Passé Vivant to the salty and difficult drolleries of Messieurs les Ronds-deCuir or Le Train de 8 heures 47.
He knew that each of these men must have had his own style, his special quality which would instantly be discerned and appraised by a French reader; he knew that some had written of the quiet life of the provinces, and that others wrote of the intrigue, the love affairs, the worldly and sophisticated gentry of Paris; he knew that some were writers of a graceful sentiment, some delicately ironic, some drolly comic, some savagely satiric, and some grimly tragic.
But all of them seemed to come from the same place, to have the same quality, to evoke the same perfume. They were the vague and shadowy figures of a charming, beautiful, and legendary kind of life — a life that was all the more legendary to him because he was constantly groping with half-meanings, filling in his faulty understanding of the language with painful intuitions, tearing desperately at the contents of unnumbered volumes, with a tortured hunger of frustration, an aching brain, a dictionary in one hand and one of these slick and flimsy little volumes in another.
And for this reason, perhaps, as much as any other — because of this savage struggle with an alien tongue, this agonizing, half-intuitive effort by which he groped his way to understanding through a book — the books themselves, and these graceful and shadowy figures who produced them, took on a quality that was as strange as the whole experience of these first weeks in Paris had become. Indeed, in later years, the legendary quality of his savage conflict with this world of print became indistinguishably mixed with the legendary quality of the life around him. Perhaps, even the swift, graceful, and fascinating little drawings and illustrations which dotted the pages of these books were in some measure responsible for this illusion: the pictures gave to the hard and difficult pages of a thousand fictions the illusion of an actual reality: in these little pictures he could see and recognize a thousand things that had already grown familiar to him — the narrow sidewalks and the tall and ancient houses of the Latin Quarter, the bridges of the Seine, the interior of a railway compartment, the great grilled gate of a chateau, people sitting at the tables in a café or on the terrace, the walls, the roofs, the chimney-pots of Paris which, no matter what changes had come about in human costume, feminine fashions, top-hats, frock-coats, or facial whiskerage had themselves changed very little.
The most extraordinary and vividly imagined phenomenon of his desperate struggle to understand these innumerable fictions was this: Although his reason told him that all these men — all these phantasmal and haunting names — Feuillet, Capus, Donnay, Tinayre, Boylesve, Bazin, Theuriet — and all the rest of them — must have known all the sweat and anguish of hard labour, the solicitude, the grinding effort, and the desperate patience, that every artist knows, he became obsessed, haunted with the idea that the works of all this graceful, strange, and fortunate company were written without effort, with the most superb casualness and ease. It was his strange delusion that all of them were not only of an equal talent — could do all kinds of writing equally well and with equal ease — but that the reason for this marvellous endowment lay somehow in the fact that they were “French”— that by the fortunate accident of race and birth each one had somehow been constituted an artist who could do all things gracefully and well, and could do nothing wrong. Favoured at birth by the great inheritance of their language, blood, and temperament, they grew up as children of a beautiful, strange, and legendary civilization whose very tongue was a guarantee of style, whose very tradition an assurance of form. These men could write nothing badly because it was not within the blood and nature of their race to do so: they must do everything gracefully, easily, and with an impeccable sense of form, because grace and ease and form were innate to them.
Finally, the, most extraordinary fact of this curious obsession was his belief that all these books had been written by their authors not in the stern and lonely solitude of some midnight room, but swiftly, casually, and easily, as one might write a letter at the table of a café.
The obsession was so strong that he could see them writing at such a place — Feuillet, Capus, Donnay, Bazin — all the rest of them, each seated in the afternoon at his own inviolable table in his favourite café, each with a writing pad, a pen and ink before him, a half-emptied bock or glass of wine beside him, an adoring and devoted old waiter hovering anxiously near him — each writing steadily, rapidly, and gracefully the pages of some new and faultless story, some graceful, perfect book, filling up page after page of manuscript in their elegant, fine handwriting, without erasures or deletions, pausing thoughtfully from time to time to stare dreamily away, stroking their lank, disordered hair, their elegant French whiskers with a thin white hand, and so far from being distracted by the gaiety, the noise and clatter of the café crowd around them, deriving a renewed vitality from its sparkling stimulation, and returning to fill up page after page again.
And he could see them meeting every afternoon — that band of Bohemian immortality, that fortunate and favoured company of art that could do no wrong — in some café on the Boulevards, or in some quiet, gracious old place hallowed by their patronage, in the Latin Quarter, in Montparnasse, or on the Boulevard St. Michel or in Montmartre.
He saw the whole scene with a blazing imagery, an exact detail, as if he had himself been present and seen and heard it all. He could hear the spirited light clamour of their conversation — like everything they did, gracious, faultless, full of ease — could see them rise to greet their famous comrades — whoever they might be- Feuillet, Capus, or Donnay, all the rest of them — could see them shake hands with the swift, firm greeting, so graceful, worldly, and so French, and hear them saying:
“Ah, my dear Maurice — how goes it with you? But — I see that I disturb you — pardon, my friend! — I see that you are busy with another of your admirable tales — Ah-h, my old one, not for the world would I disturb the flow of your so admirable genius. Parbleu! Do I wish my wretched name to become infamous to all posterity, to be heard with execration — ah, the devil! Non! The black forgetfulness of the grave is better! Eh, well, then, old comrade, till tomorrow — THEN I hope —”
“Ah, but no, but no, but no, but no, but no! My dear Octave, you shall remain! These pages here! — Pouf! it is nothing! I am already done — Attend!” Swiftly he scrawls a line or two, and then triumphantly: “Voilà! C’est fini, old cock! A trifle I was finishing for my scoundrel of a publisher, who demands it for tomorrow. — But, tell me, my dear boy — what the devil kept you in the provinces for so long a time — so long away from this dear Pa-ree? Ah, how we have missed you: my dear fellow; Paris really never is the same unless you are here to give it grace! Tiens! Tiens! Poor Courteline has been quite inconsolable! Capus has sworn daily he would go and fetch you back! Tinayre is grouchy as a bear! My dear fellow, we have all lamented you! De Régnier was certain you had got another mistress! Boylesve insisted that she was at least a duchess — Bazin, a milkmaid —”
“And you, my old one?”
“I? My dear fellow — I knew it must be chicken-pox or measles: I was certain you would not have to stir a foot out of Pa-ree to find a wench.”
“But tell me, Octave, how are all our friends? I am starved for news, I have read nothing. First of all — René—?”
“Has published another admirable work — an excellent study of life in the provinces.”
“Ah, good. And Duvernois?”
“His latest comedy has been produced and is un succès fou — a charming thing — witty, naughty, quiet in his best vein, my dear boy.”
“Renard?”
“A comedy, a book of stories, a romance — all excellent, all doing well.”
“And Courteline?”
“Une chose incomparable, my boy: a book of dialogues in his drollest vein — the public is convulsed: the police are in a towering rage about Le Gendarme est sans Pitié—”
“And Abel?”
“A formidable book, my lad — just what you would expect, a powerful tragedy, exact psychology, brilliant — but here he comes, all smiles — ah-h! I thought so! He sees you — My dear Abel, welcome: behold, our prodigal has come home again —”
Yes, it was so that it was done, without anguish, error, or maddening of the soul.
And far, far away from all this certain grace, this ease of form, this assured attaining of expression — there lay America — and all the dumb hunger of its hundred million tongues, its unfound form, its unborn art. Far, far away from this enchanted legend of a city — there lay America and the brutal stupefaction of its million streets, its unquiet heart, its vast incertitude, the huge sprawled welter of its life — its formless and illimitable distances.
And Great God! Great God! but it was farther, stranger than a dream — he noted its cruelty, savagery, horror, error, loss and waste of life, its murderous criminality, and its hypocritic mask of virtue, its lies, its horrible falseness, and its murderous closure of a telling tongue — and Great God! Great God! with every pulse and fibre in him, with the huge, sick ache of an intolerable homelessness, he was longing with every beating of his anguished heart for just one thing — RETURN!
Day by day, hour by hour, and minute by minute, the blind hunger tore at his naked entrails with a vulture’s beak. He prowled the streets of Paris like a maddened animal, he hurled himself at the protean complexities of its million-footed life like a soldier who hurls himself into a battle: he was baffled, sick with despair, wrung, trembling and depleted, finally exhausted, caught in the toils of that insatiate desire, that terrible devouring hunger that grew constantly from what it fed upon and that drove him blindly to madness. The hopeless and unprofitable struggle of the Faustian life had never been so horribly evident as it now was — the futility of his insane efforts to memorize every stone and paving brick in Paris, to burn the vision of his eyes through walls and straight into the lives and hearts of a million people, to read all the books, eat all the food, drink all the wine, to hold the whole gigantic panorama of the universe within his memory, and somehow to make “one small globe of all his being,” to compact the accumulated experience of eternity into the little prism of his flesh, the small tenement of his brain, and somehow to use it all for one final, perfect, all-inclusive work — his life’s purpose, his heart’s last pulse and anguish, and his soul’s desire.
As a result of all this anguished and frustrated struggle he began now to go about with a small notebook in his pocket, the worn stub of a chewed pencil in his hands.
And because everything went into this mad mélange, because by every one of these scrawls of notes and sometimes incoherent words — even by the thousands of crude drawings, swift designs which he scrawled down in a thousand towns and places, to get the texture of a wall, the design of a door, the shape of a table, even the sword-cut on a man’s scarred face — because in all of these shells and splinters that were thrown off from his tormented and uneasy brain the terrible Faustian fever of his tortured spirit was evident — no better image of his life — the life of a young man of that period — of modern man caught in the Faustian serpent-toils of modern life — can be given than the splintered jottings in these battered little books afford.
Here, then, picked out at random from the ferment of ten thousand pages and a million words — put down just as they were written, in fragments, jots, or splintered flashes, without order or coherence — here, with all its vanity, faith, despair, joy, and anguish, with all its falseness, error and pretension, and with all its desperate sincerity, its incredible hope, its insane desire, is a picture of a man’s soul and heart — the image of his infuriate desire — caught hot and instant, drawn flaming from the forge of his soul’s agony.
Monday, November 17, 1924: Worked over 5 hours up to present (9.40) Cigarettes and coffee — Very tired.
Tuesday: Worked 4 hours yesterday. Very tired today only an hour — more tonight —
Wednesday: Good week’s work last week — Four or five hours’ ACTUAL writing every day — I may succeed ultimately because I’m not content with what I do.
I was born in 1900 — I am now 24 years old. During that period I think the best writing in English has been done by James Joyce in “Ulysses”— I think the best writing in the ballad has been done by G. K. Chesterton in “Lepanto.” The best writing in sustained narrative verse by John Masefield — particularly in “The Dauber,” “The River” and “The Widow in The Bye Street.” Who produce copiously — Arnold Bennett — The best practitioners of the Essay — Belloc — the most gigantically thorough realist — Theodore Dreiser — The most sparing selection and unfailingly competent — Galsworthy — The best play for Poetry —“The Playboy of Western World”— The best journalist — Sinclair Lewis.
The critic with the greatest subtlety — T. S. Eliot — The critic with the greatest range and power — H. L. Mencken — The best woman writer — May Sinclair — The next best — Virginia Woolf — The next best — Willa Cather.
Wednesday Night — November 26, 1924: At midnight eating at Chez Marianne — First day I have not worked for two weeks but am going home to work after eating. Up at 12.30 today after last night felt sick — walked to bank — found no mail — wrote and sent letters to Mama and to University. Talked to young fellow in bank about Switzerland — had lunch at Taverne Royale — Took taxi to Place des Vosges — Went to Victor Hugo Museum — Walked around Square — then back to Carnavalet — at National Archives — The narrow streets, the narrow sidewalks, the great buses, taxis, autos, bicycles, trucks and the catty people jabbering and squalling got me in a stew — Looked over distressing tons of books at a bookshop, and went on feeling crushed — Bought two books — Then got taxi Rue du Temple and so home through the jam of Rue de Rivoli — Women outside pawing cheap articles at Samaritaine. Then home to hotel where bathed went out to Deux Magots two aperitifs then to Apollo Revue! — Not as bad as some — one or two good songs — but of course, on whole quite stupid.
Thursday — November 27, 1924: At one, after working till five this morning. Dining at Drouant’s — very rich, red restaurant filled with business men talking of les Anglais, les Américains, et cinq cent mille francs — at Drouant’s — a cold consommé, a rumpsteak grille — avec des pommes soufflées — a fond d’artichaut Mornay (a cheese and cream dressing and the ends of artichokes — delicious) a coffee and a half bottle of Nuit St. Georges couvert 4 fr. total 44 fr.
At one table three Frenchmen of 50 or more — one of 40 — one with black beard — coal-black, neatly trimmed, naked around jaws — another a heavy distinguished man — grey beard pompadoured — grey close-cropped moustache — high-coloured — nervous grey eyes shot with red — hands white, taut and tapping constantly, while the face smiles — talks politely — another a red gnarled satanic face — fierce with rich foods and wines — smooth-shaven — and the youngest — black hair, a black moustache — a quiet smiling, well-fleshed type. He had rich colour — red shot with richness, the satanic yet not unpleasant cast of face — the cropped brown moustache and such pompadoured brownish hair — a Gallic type.
LATER: Seated at the café in front of Magasin du Louvre and Palais Royal — Heard a high even monotone that tickles the ear like a dynamo — It made me think of a great locomotive in the yards at Altamont — steam shut off (perhaps) and the high small ear-tickling dynamic noise they make.
Tuesday — December 2, 1924:
MOCK LITERARY ANECDOTES:
Young mannered voice of Harvard johnny: “Oh! Simply PRICELESS! Don’t you L-O-O-VE that?
. . . MARVELLOUS!” etc. — telling what Oscar said to Whistler, and what Whistler answered him.
A certain kind of mind collects these — pale, feeble, rootless, arty, hopeless, lost — Joel Pierce tells them, too. First time I heard them at Harvard what sophisticated raconteurs I thought them! — God, how green I was! “You will, Oscar, you will,” and all the rest of it! — Today, sitting on terrace at Taverne Royale, I made some of my own. Here they are:
One day as Whistler was standing before a window in St. James’s Street observing some prints of Battersea Bridge, he was accosted by Oscar Wilde coming in the opposite direction. “You will, James, you will,” said Wilde with generous impulsiveness.
“Gad,” remarked the inimitable James, imperturbably adjusting his monocle, “I wish I had said that!”
One day in June, Anatole France went to Rodin’s studio for luncheon. The talk having turned to early Greek primitives, Rodin remarked:
“Some writers have a great deal to say and an atrocious style. But you, dear Master, have a delicious style.”
“And you, Master?” queried France ironically, allowing his eyes to rest upon the torso of The Thinker, “since when did you become a critic?”
In the burst of laughter that followed the thrust, Rodin had to admit himself floored for once.
A young actor who had, it must be confessed, more ambition than talent, one day rushed excitedly up to Sir Henry Irving during the rehearsal of “Hamlet”:
“It seems to me, sir,” he burst out without preliminaries, “that some actors ruin their parts by overplaying them.”
“And some,” remarked Sir Henry, after an awful pause, “don’t.”
One day Sir James Barrie discovered Bernard Shaw while he was lunching at the Athen?um, staring somewhat disconsolately at an unsavoury mess of vegetables that adorned his plate.
“I hear you are working on a new play,” remarked Barrie, whimsically eyeing the contents of the platter.
For once G. B. S. had no answer ready.
Why won’t these do?
(Suggestion to Young American writing Book Reviews for New York Times in classical, simple, god-like manner of Anatole France.)
“The new book of Monsieur Henry Spriggins, which lies before me on my desk, fills me with misgivings. The author is young and intolerant of simple things. He is full of talent, but he is proud, and has not a simple heart. What a pity!” (etc.)
Wednesday — December 3, 1924: Comédie Francaise tonight “Les Plaideurs”— and “Phèdre”— Respect for play grew and for actors diminished and went on — The French applauded loudly when Madame Weber ended a long declamation on a screech.
LATER: To Régence and Harry’s — Bought some books along the quays — Saw Mrs. Martin at hotel today — Story of how she had been robbed — The picture galleries and antique shops of Rue des Saints-Pères.
Saturday — December 6:
Young Icarus lies drowned, God knows where.
Oxford in pursuit of a woman — one of the most dreary spectacles God hath given — Buol’s in the afternoon —
Foolish Question: Why are the Tories so eager to say Democracy has failed?
Hair like a copper cloud — feather and flame come back again.
The gutted plums bee-burrowed.
The poisoned inch around the heart.
The cancerous inch.
The burning inch of tongue.
The hairy grass.
The long sea-locks.
The hairy seas.
The other gate of ivory —
Ida — Cadmus — blunt drummed woodenly with blunt fingers. Sir Leoline the baron rich — Thunder-cuffing Zeus — Erasmus fed on rotten eggs — what a breath — Has an angel local motion or “The goose-soft snow.”
Feathery snow — The feather-quilted snow.
Freckled eyes.
Wild Ceres through the wheat.
The slow dance of dancers.
The gull swerves seaward like hope — September full of departing leaves and wings.
He sat alone four thousand miles from home — the lonely death of seas at dawn.
The decent and untainted eyes that look on spattered death — Myself dreaming of old battles — For a child the spear goes clearly through — The musical horns beg and the battles press — The phantasy of bloody death: The cloven brain-pan — the one lost second near enough to touch its brother life, but infinitely far.
The wind-blown lights of the town.
A branch of stars.
A hen and a pig.
Quills — frills.
Mired — feathers.
The vast low stammer of the night.
By the rim — the geese go waddling to the Fair.
The minute-whirring flies buzz home to death.
“Old England will muddle through, my lads”—
She has muddled and she’s through: but she’s not through muddling.
Gull-cry and gull are gone.
Shadow and hawk are gone.
Shadow and hawk are gone.
Shadow and hawk are —
Friday Night — December 12, 1924: The Fratellini Brothers: How in his rich robe I saw him — the younger brother — waiting for the act — the waiting is all over — The burlesque musical act — They were great, sad, epic — what clowns should be.
Salle Rubens with all the MEAT— All the people clustered about — dull.
Mona Ugly Lisa.
The Virgin with Saint Anne — a great picture.
Guido Reni — the sainted and sugared faces.
The Italians — Veronese — The Cana — The Gigantic three-storey canvases.
Zurberan — Goya and the Grey — Picture of a Gentleman on horseback — Nicolas Maes — Rembrandt’s picture of his brother.
Sam’s — The man from San Francisco with the loud, dark, debauched face.
“We had ham and eggs for lunch across at Ciro’s, Anne”— the two barkeepers in Harry’s, “Chip” and Bob — names of dogs and horses.
Velasquez in the Louvre.
Vetzel’s again 12.30 Apéritif (X365) The arch of the opera I have never seen before, things sit like this.
[Here follows drawing]
Remember “Faust” at The Opéra.
The Promenoirs — The vast stage — click-clack of feet in the music.
I awoke this morning in a crucifixion of fear and nervousness — What if they hadn’t written? What? What? What?
My agony as I approached the place — My distrust of Paris in peril — City of light disloyalties. Sun never shines more than two days (for me) here — Went to American Express — Harry’s Bar — The men at Vetzel’s eating —
The French are not bad but children — old men too wise and kind for hatred — but French French French and Suspicious.
How beautiful the Fratellini are! How fine a thing is a French circus! Their enormous interest in children — The lion-taming act — by far the best and finest I have ever seen — and I felt sorry for the lions — Savoir is right in this.
Monday — December 15, 1924: I am getting a new sense of control — millions of books don’t annoy me so much — went along the Seine today after Louvre — most of it worthless old rubbish I must begin to put up my fences now — I can’t take the world or this city with me.
Things in Paris I must see at once — Père Lachaise — ALSO investigate old quarter again around Place des Vosges — Go THERE first thing tomorrow — Go to Cluny Musée again — And up and down Rue de la Seine — Also Ile St. Louis.
Books I want: Julien Benda — New one by Soupault (?) Charles Derennes — L’Education Sexuelle. Read one of the Vautel things.
Get for inspection — and at random Le Petit Livre — Mon Livre Favori — Bibl. Nationale — Livre Epatant — go into Court of Palais Royal — Investigate there —
Louvre today — Mantegna’s picture of St. Sebastian C.
Giotto’s great picture of St. Francis d’Assisi receiving stigma from Christ —
Gros — Pictures of Napoleon at war — The one of the leper’s house at Jaffa a good one — Huge naked leper held in kneeling position — Weight of body.
Books I want — Go to bookstalls in Seine for books on Paris twenty or thirty years ago with naughty illustrations.
Tuesday — December 16, 1924: Along Seine again — Looked at thousands of books and bought one — a critique on Julien Benda — Miles and miles of books — but also, miles and miles of repetitions —
The pictures — cavaliers seducing pretty ladies; one of women half naked embracing pillow — called Le Rêve — People in old French stage-comedies — Then 1000’s of La Chimie, La Physique, La Géologie, L’Algèbre, La Géométrie —
Letters — Morceaux Choisis of XVIII S. All the authors I have never heard of — but THAT is the same at home.
Wednesday — December 17, 1924: Today bought books — Bookshop on Rue St. Honoré— Stock’s.
Bought Benda there — Along the river — Tons of Trash — L’Univers — The Miracle of France — 4 mos. in the United States, etc. etc. — Les Cicéron, Ovide, Sénèque, etc.
Bought Confessions of Alfred Musset — Stall at Pont Neuf with dirty books — Journal d’une Masseuse.
Sadie Blackeyes — Lovers of The Whip — The Pleasures of Married Life — The Galleries of The Palais Royal where the bookshops are — Whole series edited by Guillaume Apollinaire —
Pictures, stamps, coins — Daumier-like picture of man having tooth pulled — Then the near dirty ones of ladies with silver wings — Silhouette-like — Then the near XVIII Century ones.
Old Books — Seem to be millions of these too — Essais de l’Abbé Chose sur la Morale, etc.
The Faustian hell again!
At la Régence: Semaine de No?l, 1924:
The people who say they “read nothing but the best” are not, as some people call them, snobs. They are fools. The battle of the Spirit is not to read and to know the best — it is to find it — The thing that has caused me so much toil and trouble has come from a deep-rooted mistrust in me of all cultured authority. I hunger for the treasure that I fancy lies buried in a million forgotten books, and yet my reason tells me that the treasure that lies buried there is so small that it is not worth the pain of disinterment.
And yet nearly everything in the world of books that has touched my life most deeply has come from authority. I have not always agreed with authority that all the books called great ARE great, but nearly all the books that have seemed great to me have come from among this number.
I have not discovered for myself any obscure writer who is as great a novelist as Dostoievsky, nor any obscure poet with the genius of Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
But I have mentioned Coleridge, and although my use of his name will not, I believe, cause any protest, it may cause surprise. Why not Shelley, or Spenser, or Milton? — It is here that my war with Authority — to which I owe everything — begins again.
There are in the world of my spirit certain gigantic figures who, although great as well in the world of authority, are yet overshadowed, and in some places, loom as enormous half-ghosts — hovering upon the cloudy borderland between obscurity and living remembrance.
Such a man is Samuel Taylor Coleridge. To me, he is not one of the great English poets. He is The Poet. To me he has not to make obeisance at the throne of any other monarch — he is there by Shakespeare and Milton and Spenser.
At La Régence: Remembering the prostitute with rotten teeth that I talked to last night on Rue Lafayette:
My dirt is not as dirty as your dirt. My cleanness is cleaner than your cleanness.
If I have a hole in my sock that is cunning.
If you have a hole in your stocking love flies out of the window. Why are we like this? Boredom is the bedfellow of all the Latin peoples — the English, in spite of the phrase “bored Englishman,” are not bored.
The Germans are eager and noisy about everything they are told they should be interested in.
The Americans are interested in everything for a week — a week at a time — except Sensation: they are interested in that all the time.
I have heard a great deal of the “smiling Latins,” the “gay Latins,” etc. I have seen few indications that the Latins are gay. They are noisy — they are really a sombre and passionate people — the Italian face when silent is rather sullen.
In New York the opportunities for learning, and acquiring a culture that shall not come out of the ruins, but belong to life, are probably greater than anywhere else in the world.
This is because America is young and rich and comparatively unencumbered by bad things.
Tradition, which saves what is good and great in Europe, also saves what is poor, so that one wades through miles of junk to come to a great thing.
In New York books are plentiful and easy to get. The music and the theatre are the best in the world.
The great trouble with New York is that one feels uncomfortable while enjoying these things — In the daytime a man should be making money. The time to read is at night before one goes to bed. The time to hear music or go to the theatre is also at night. The time to look at a picture is on Sunday.
Another fault comes from our lack of independence. I am sure some of the most knowing people in the world, about the arts, are in America. I cannot read a magazine like The Dial, or The Nation and The New Republic without getting frightened. One man wrote a book called Studies in Ten Literatures — which, of course, is foolish. We want to seem knowing about all these things because we have not enough confidence in ourselves.
We have had niggers for 300 years living all over the place — but all we did about it was to write minstrel shows, and ‘coon stories, until two or three years ago when the French discovered for us how interesting they are. We let Paul Morand, and the man who wrote Batouala, and Soupault do it for us — Then we began to write stories about Harlem, etc.
Instead of whining that we have no traditions, or that we must learn by keeping constantly in touch with European models, or by keeping away from them, we should get busy telling some of the stories about America that have never been told.
A book like Main Street, which made such a stir, is like Main Street. It is like “I’ve seen all Europe” tourists, who have spent two days in each country in a round-the-town bus.
In a magazine like The American Mercury the stones are also too much of a pattern — they’re all about how the “Deacon Screwed the Methodist Minister’s Wife,” and how the “Town Prostitute Was Put in Jail for Coming to Church on Sunday and Mixing with the Good Folks.”
When you hear people saying about Babbitt — that it is not the whole story and that much more can be said — you agree with them. Then they begin to talk about “the other side” and you lose hope. You see they mean, by “other side,” Dr. Crane and Booth Tarkington.
So far from these being “the other side,” there are a million other sides. And so far from Babbitt being too strong, the stories that may be written about America will make Babbitt an innocent little child’s book to be read at the Christmas School entertainment along with The Christmas Carol and “Excelsior.” The man who suggests the strangeness and variety of this life most is Sherwood Anderson. Or was. I think he’s got too fancy since he wrote Winesburg, Ohio.
A French writer who said there was no real variety in the life of the French because they all had red wine on the table, sat at little tables in cafés to gossip, and had mistresses, would be called a fool. Yet an American will criticize his country for standardization on no better grounds — namely, that most of them are Methodists or Baptists, Democrats or Republicans, Rotarians or Kiwanians.
Babbitt is a very interesting book. But I believe it would be possible for a German writer with a talent similar to Sinclair Lewis to write a book called Schmidt or Bauer which would be just as sweeping a portrait.
Do you want to know what the gentleman looks like? He is much easier to describe than Babbitt.
Tuesday — December 23, 1924: The mystery explained! Today, at American Library, found out what it is:
“Time — that dimension of the world which we express in terms of before and after — the temporal sequence pervades mind and matter alike.”
Time the form of the internal sense, and space the form of the external sense.
Theory of Relativity — the time-units of both time and space are neither points nor moments — but moments in the history of a point.
W. James — Within a definite limited interval of duration known as the specious present there is the direct perception of the temporal relations.
After an event has passed beyond the specious present it can only enter into consciousness by reproductive memory.
James —“The Object of Memory is only an object imagined in the past to which the emotion of belief adheres.”
Temporal experience divided into three qualitatively distinct intervals: the remembered past, the perceived specious present, and the anticipated future — By means of the tripartite division we are able to inject our present selves into the temporal stream of our own experience.
By arrangement of temporal orders of past with temporal orders of future — we can construct a temporal order of our specious presents and their contents.
Thus time has its roots in experience and yet appears to be a dimension in which experiences and their contents are to be arranged.
Thus the stuff from which time is made is of the nature of experienced data.
The Zenonian paradoxes: Achilles cannot catch up with the almost here save by occupying an infinity of positions.
A flying arrow cannot remain where it is, nor be where it is not.
These things do not deal with space or time but with the properties of infinite assemblages and dense series (Americana).
Weber’s at midnight: The waiters in Weber’s standing in a group in their black coats and white boiled shirts —
All around the great mirrors reflecting there — for a moment a STRANGE picture I thought of TIME!
The horrible monotony of the French — Weber’s at midnight some Frenchmen in evening dress — the heavy eyelids — the dangling legs — the look of weary vitality —
Then in come some “Parisiennes”— God! God! All sizes and shapes and all the same — Unfit for anything else in the world, and not good for what they are — The texture of enamelled tinted skin, the hard avaricious noses, the chic style of coats, hair, eyebrows, etc.
The great myth that the Latins are romantic people. The Latins have qualities and standards that we do not possess — Hence we overvalue them.
There are many places in the world where life attains a greater variety, interest or profundity than in Paris (viz., New York, London, Vienna, Munich). Yet a great many Americans make their homes in Paris because they are sure it is the centre of the world’s intellectual and cultural reputations.
It is easier for a writer to secure a reputation in France than in any other country. Many French writers have very respectable reputations who would be laughed at in other countries. For example, Henri Bordeaux — Some Americans who study French literature think he is a distinguished writer. His name has a solid, respectable sound to it. On the cover of all his books is printed “Member of the French Academy.” But you could hardly find an intellectual in America who would say a kind word for Harold Bell Wright. Yet Harold Bell Wright — poor as he may be-is a better writer than Henri Bordeaux. If you don’t believe it, read them. Americans are very unfair about this.
The way things go: At 6.10 A.M. the street lights of Paris go off. I sit at a little all-night café in Grand Boulevard opposite Rue Faubourg de Montmartre and watch light widen across the sky behind Montmartre. At first a wide strip of blue-grey — a strip of violet light. You see the line of the two clear and sharp. The paper trucks of Hachette, Le Petit Parisien, etc., go by.
In the bar a rattling of leaden, holey coins — the five-, ten — and twenty-five-centime pieces. Taxi-drivers drinking café rhum, debating loudly in hoarse sanguinary voices. A prostitute, the blonde all-night antiquity of the Quarter streets, drinking rich hot chocolate, crunching crusty croissants at the bar. The veteran of a million loves, well known and benevolently misprized, hoarse with iniquity and wisdom. A pox upon you, Marianne: You have made Monsieur le Président très triste; the third leg of the Foreign Legion wears a sling because of you!
A swart-eyed fellow, oiled and amorous, sweetly licks with nozzly tongue his prostitute’s rouge-varnished face: with choking secret laughter and with kissy, wetty talkie he cajoles her; she answers in swart choked whisperings with her sudden shrill prostitute’s scream of merriment.
A morning rattle of cans and ashes on the pavements. With rich jingle-jangle and hollow clitter-clatter a Paris milk wagon passes. Suddenly, a screak of brakes: all over the world the moaning screak of brakes, and racing, starting motors.
Across the street in faint grey-bluish light the news kiosk is opening up.
“Est-ce que vous avez Le New York ‘Erald?”
“Non, monsieur. Ce n’est pas encore arrivé.”
“Et Le Tchicago Treebune?”
“?a pas plus, monsieur. C’est aussi en retard ce matin.”
“Merci. Alors: Le Matin.”
“Bien, monsieur.”
Passage of leaden sous: the smell of ink-worn paper, dear to morning throughout the world. A big Hachette truck swerves up, an instant halt, the flat heavy smack of fresh-corded ink-warm paper on the pavement, a hoarse cry and instant loud departure!
?a aussi, monsieur. Sing ye bi-i-i-rds, sing! Light up your heart, O son of man!
Sweet is the breath of morn, her rising sweet, with charm of earliest birds!
Some things will never change: some things will always be the same: brother we cannot die, we must be saved; we are united at the heart of night and morning.
A good time now, just before dawn and morning. Surfeit of sterile riches: harvests of stale bought love: the burnt-out candle-end of night, the jaded blaze of crimson light, in shattered bars; numb weary lust — which one? which one?
The prostitutes at daybreak, the dead brilliance of electric smiles.
Tired, tired, tired.
Tuesday: Woman who sang tonight at Concert Mayol — She was near 50 — magnificent teeth — so good they made me uneasy — Those things in her head — but how? They keep them so. This comes to me — that they spend all their time looking after them: there is something filthy about this.
On the Boulevards — 3.20 du matin. Reading the Sourire for strumpet-house items — I want to find me a Ballon of Champagne — First of all — préservatif right to my left around corner Rue Faubourg de Montmartre; all-night pharmacy.
Along the quais again this afternoon to the bookstalls — Made afraid by the junk — Bought a dozen books or so, but no “prints” or “etchings”— Countless old-fashioned prints — pictures of Versailles — the Palais Royal, the Revolution — Sentimental and cheap pictures — Florid ones —“La Courtisane Passionnée,” etc. Stage-coach pictures, etc. Works of Eugène Scribe — The little books bound or tied, so you can’t look — nothing in them — Vie à la Campagne — countless cheap books — ah, I have a little of it all! — Strasbourg.
Christmas Week — Colmar, Alsace–Lorraine — Written on the Spot.
The Isenheimer Altar of Mathias Grünewald in the Cloisters of the Unterlinden Museum at Colmar:
There is nothing like it in the world. I have spent over 4 months getting here — it is much more wonderful than one imagines it will be. The altar is set up NOT IN ONE PIECE but in three sections in a big room with groined ceilings, a long groined room like a Dominikaner Cloister.
The first two “volets” of the altar — Everything is distorted and out of perspective. The figure of the Christ is twice as big as the other figures — the pointing finger of Saint Antoine is much too big for his body — but everything in this figure points along the joints and elbows of that arm and ends in the pointing finger.
The Lamb with its straight brisk feet, its dainty right foreleg bent delicately about the Cross and red blood spouting from its imperturbable heart into a goblet of rich gold, is a masterpiece of symbolic emotion that strikes far beyond intelligence.
The body of Christ, and its agony, are indescribable. The hands and the feet are enlarged to meet the agony — the hands are tendons of agony, the feet are not feet but lengths of twisted tendons driven through by a bolt and ending in bent, broken, bleeding toes. A supernatural light falls upon the immense twisted length of the body (a grey-white-green) and yet COMPLETELY SOLID LIGHT— you can count the ribs, the muscles (the head falling to the right), full of brutal agony — it is crowned with long thorns and rusty blood — it droops over, it is too big, Christ is dead.
The great figure of the woman in white comes up and breaks backward at the middle and is caught in the red arms of the pitiful Saint. The fingers of the Magdalen are bent in eloquent supplication.
The blackness of hell’s night behind — the unearthly greenish supernatural light upon the figures — on Christ’s dead, sinewed, twisted, riven gigantic body and on the living flesh of the other figures.
The sly face of the Virgin in the wing of the Annunciation — the eyes slanting up under lowered lids in a sly leer — the fat loose sensual mouth half open, with the tongue visible — a look of sly bawdiness over all.
The enormous and demoniac intelligence that illuminates the piece in Grünewald’s Altar — the angels playing instruments in “La Vierge Glorifiée par les Anges”— the faces have a SINISTER GOLDEN LIGHT— an almost unholy glee. You can hear MAD HEAVENLY MUSIC. This is not true with Italians — syrup and sugar.
This is the greatest and also the most “modern” picture I have ever seen.
Christmas Week — 1924: Returning to Paris from Strasbourg: The approach to Paris through the Valley of the Marne — Winter — The very magnificent rainbow — the rocking clacketing train.
The suburbs of Paris — Dark — The little double-deckers rattling past loaded with people — The weary approaches to a great city — Endless repetition — monotonous endlessness — The sadness of seeing people pass you in a lighted train or subway. Why is this?
PARIS: There is nothing that I do not know about Paris — That sounds like the foolishest boast but that is true — I am sitting on the terrace of the Taverne Royale — Rue Royale — It is winter — it is cold — but it is the same — to one hand the Madeleine — to the other the Place de la Concorde — to the right that of the Champs–Elysées — the Arc — the Bois — the fashionable quarters — the strumpet-houses of that district — the rue — the Troc — the Tower — the Champs-deMars — the Montparnasse section — the Latin Quarter — the bookshops — the cafés — the Ecole — the Institut — the St. Mich — the Ile — the Notre Dame — The Old Houses — the Rue de Rivoli — the Tour St. Jacques — the Carnavalet — the Hugo — Vosges — the Bastille — the Gare de Lyon — the Gare de l’Est — du Nord — the Montmartre — the Butte — the cafés — houses — the Rue Lepic — the Port Clignancourt — the La Villette — The Parc Monceau — the Bois — Great circle, unending universe of life, huge legend of dark time!
But unannealed by water the gaunt days sloped into the grots of time.
Paris, Saturday Night: Today has been a horrible one — I was able to sleep only the most diseased and distressed sleep (the worst sort of American-inEurope sleep) last night after leaving Mrs. Morton. I was sick with my loss (the loss of the picture and several letters Helen sent me) and I got up sick and with the SHAKES this morning — I came to the Abiga bar — I went to the Am. Ex. Co. — I went to Wepler’s in Montmartre — At each place, as I knew they would, with mean and servile regret cut by mocking, they were sorry, sorry, sorry.
The day was of the most horrible European sort — Something that passes understanding — the wet heavy air, that deadens the soul, puts a lump of indigestible lead in the solar plexus, depresses and fatigues the flesh until one seems to lift himself leadenly through the thick wet steaming air with a kind of terrible fear — an excitement that is without hope, that awaits only the news of some further grief, failure, humiliation, and torture. There is a lassitude that enters the folds and lappings of the brain, that makes one hope for better things and better work tomorrow, but hope without belief or conviction.
The grey depression of the wet buildings — the horrible nervous pettiness of the French, swarming, honking, tooting along the narrow streets and the two-foot sidewalks, while the heavy buses beetle past —
A chapter called PARIS or So You’re Going to “Paris”? (Perhaps a piece for a magazine in This.)
The fear always of the corners — you are coming out into the open, there will be waiting to thrust at you, the heavy grinding buses, the irritation of the horns, etc.
A chapter to be called “The Arithmetic of the Soul.”
The music deepened like a passion.
All of our hearts are fulfilled of you, all of our souls are growing warm with you, all of our lives are beating out their breath for you, and the strange feel of our pulses is playing through our blood for you, immortal and unending living.
Sunday — Up at noon, bathed, etc. Lunch at Casenave’s — Went to Delacroix and Louvre — Something over-rich and bloody about it. — Note how French love to paint blood (Delacroix)— then along Seine bookstalls — found only junk — then to Lipp’s for beer and cervelas — then back to hotel where worked from 6.30–10.30 — Then out to eat at Taverne Royale — Walk back through Vend?me and Rue St. Honoré— Read a little and worked from ONE to 3.00 — 6 hours today.
Sunday Night: I feel low — discouraged by the mass of things again tonight. I must make some decisive action — the new web of streets behind the dome has depressed me.
The mind grows weary with such a problem as mine, by constantly retracing his steps, by constantly feeling around the same cylinder from which there seems AT PRESENT to be no escape.
The European temper is one that has learned control — that is, it has learned indifference — Each man writes his own book without worrying very much about what the other has written — he reads little or if he reads much, it is only a trifle — a spoonful of the ocean of print that inundates everything — Picture Anatole France — with a reputation for omniscience — picking daintily here and there among the bookstalls of the Seine. To go by them affects me with horror and weariness — as it does Paul Valéry — but I lack his power to resist. I must go by there — and if I do again and again I cannot keep away from them.
More and more I am convinced that to be a great writer a man must be something of an ass. I read of Tolstoi that he read no newspapers, that he went away and lived among peasants for 7 years at a time, and that for six years he read nothing except the novels of Dumas. Yet such a man could write great books. I almost think it is because of this that he did.
Bernard Shaw, one of our prophets at the present time, is worshipped past idolatry by many people who consider that he knows everything or practically everything.
From what I have been able to discover of his reading from his writing, I can be sure that he has read Shakespeare — not very carefully, Ibsen very carefully, a book by Karl Marx, which made a deep impression on him, the tracts of the Fabian Society, and the writings of Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Webb.
There is always the moment when we must begin to write. There are always the hundreds, the thousands, of struggle, of getting up, of pacing about, of sitting down, of laborious uneven accomplishment. During the time of actual work, what else besides ourselves can help us? Can we call to mind then the contents of 20,000 books? Can we depend on anything other than ourselves for help?
At La Régence:
How certain trivial words and phrases haunt the brain — cannot be forgotten — come back again even when years have passed. Today, have been hearing old voices, old songs, fleeting forgotten words of twenty years ago — my mother’s — my father’s — the voices of the summer boarders on the porches — most of all, Dinwood Bland, sitting in pleasant backyard of his house in Norfolk, a drink in his hand, his blind eyes blindly fixed upon the flashing sparkling waters of Hampton Roads, blindly on a white ship passing — his thin, senile, evil, strangely attractive face touched with bitterness, revulsion, and his weary disgust with life as he said:
“My father was an educated loafer.”
And now, all day long, “the sound of these words rings and echoes in my mind until I can listen to nothing else.” And sitting here I feel like Coleridge when the rhyme for Youth and Age came to him (10 Sept. 1823 Wed. morning 10 o’clock)—“An Air,” he says, “that whizzed dia engkefalou” (right across the diameter of my brain) exactly like a Hummel Bee — etc.
So too, with me, all afternoon — and Dinwood Bland’s haunting phrase about his father has now become:
“My father was an educated loafer,
My mother was an alcoholic bum,
My sister’s name was Nelly, she had a lovely belly,
Aside from that she was a lousy scum.
“My brother Pete, he went and joined the Navy,
My brother Hank, he went and caught the clap,
My little sister Anny, fell down and bruised her fanny —
Because we had an educated Pap,”— etc.
Obscure, ridiculous — but old words, old phrases, and forgotten sayings — why do they come back to haunt our meaning?
At La Régence:
On quotations — The practice of nineteenth-century “good” writers was to decorate their compositions with neat little patterns of quotations. That practice still persists in a great deal of the correct writing of the present — viz., the essays and leading articles of The Atlantic Monthly, The Spectator, Harper’s, The Century, The London Mercury, etc. — The quotation habit is generally a vicious one, often it has not even so worthy a design as to borrow from stronger and greater people an energy and clearness that we do not have, but rather serves as a sort of diploma to certify culture — said culture consisting in our ability to quote scraps from Lamb, Dickens, John Keats, Browning, Doctor Johnson, and Matthew Arnold. The distortion this works upon the original sinew of the mind is incalculable — writing becomes a meeting of pseudo-courtliness neatly designed to arrive before Lamb with a bow and to be handed by Dickens to Lord Tennyson with a graceful flourish. The phrase “apt quotation” is one of the most misleading phrases ever invented. Most quotations, so far from being apt to any purpose, are distinguished by all the ineptitude a politician displays when, having spoken for twenty minutes on the Nicaraguan question, he says: “That reminds me of a little story I heard the other day. It seems there were two Irishmen whose names were Pat and Mike”— then proceeds to a discussion of the Prohibition issue, after his convulsed audience is somewhat recovered.
Europe and America are still too far apart — the “interminable” day is far too long — six days are far too long — for the intense impression — to compare and observe their essential difference —
Results: We must have them closer together — as the English and the French — as Dover and Calais — things that matter in our life cannot be recalled so easily. I have lived deeply, intensely, vividly, on the whole unhappily, for six months. Some people say that is all that matters. I do not think it is. But things cannot be called up so easily.
I am wondering in a vast vague about her. I love her, I think of seeing her again with a sense of strangeness and wonder; but I have no sort of idea what it will be like, or what has happened. Why can we not remember the faces of those we love? This is true: Their faces melt into a thousand shades and shapes and images of faces the moment that we try to fix them in our memory. It is only the face of a stranger we remember there. Why?
Never have the manyness and the muchness of things caused me such trouble as in the past six months. But never have I had so firm a conviction that our lives can live upon only a few things, that we must find them, and begin to build our fences.
All creation is the building of a fence.
But deeper study always, sharper senses, profounder living; NEVER an end to curiosity!
The fruit of all this comes later. I must think. I must mix it all with myself and with America. I have caught much of it on paper. But infinitely the greater part is in the wash of my brain and blood.
Shaw makes a fool of himself when he writes of Napoleon, because he hates Napoleon and wants to make him ridiculous. But Shaw makes a hero of himself when he writes of C?sar; Shaw’s C?sar is the best C?sar I know of. It beats Shakespeare. It is as C?sar looks (Naples Museum), I am sure. I am sure C?sar was like this.
But it is a mistake to suppose that Napoleon got his hair in the soup.
Dirge: Why are we unhappy? — I have no need to envy this man’s fame — nor skill to cloak myself in that man’s manner — I am as naked now as sorrow — and all I ask is: Why are we so unhappy?
Why are we unhappy?
In my father’s country there are yet men with quiet eyes and slow, fond, kindly faces.